Coming Soon: A Truly Chinese Internet

Replete with its own thriving news portals, social media and gaming sites, the Chinese Internet could take a major step toward becoming fully Chinese by the end of the year.

Speaking in an interview Wednesday, Fady Chehadé, president of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) – the private body that oversees the basic design of the Internet — said the organization would roll out Chinese character options for top-level domains in the second half of 2013.

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

A screen shows a rolling feed of new ‘Generic Top-Level Domain Names (gTLDs) which have been applied for during a press conference hosted by ICANN in central London, on June 13, 2012.

A top-level domain is the part of a web address that appears after the dot, such as .com, .net and .edu. ICANN had previously approved only a limited number of address endings using the Roman alphabet but is currently working on introducing a whole array of new address endings both in English and other languages, including Chinese, Arabic, Korean, Russian and Japanese.

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Although Chinese characters can already be used in the main part of a web address, Chinese websites have tended to stick with Roman URLs. Mr. Chehadé said many companies and organizations have been waiting for Chinese language address endings before launching full character addresses.

“In China the numbers will be staggering once we release the all Chinese character” domain names, he said.

But there’s more to the top-level domain expansion than linguistic convenience. For years, ICANN and the U.S. have resisted efforts by China, Russia and a number of other countries to wrest away control over Internet addresses. Los Angeles-based ICANN was created in 1998 at the behest of the U.S. Department of Commerce to take over management of the Internet’s domain name system, which had previously controlled by the U.S. government. Opponents of ICANN argue that each country should be able to manage the Internet addresses in their own territories.

The fight came to a head at the World Conference on International Telecommunications in December, when a coalition including China, Russia and Saudi Arabia put forward a proposal to give more control over the Internet to the United Nation’s International Telecommunication Union. In response The U.S. and a number of other countries walked away from an agreement that would have given more power to the ITU, ensuring ICANN’s continued leadership as the arbiter of domain names.

The language additions are part of ICANN’s push to reduce global opposition to its regulatory power by leaving behind its U.S. roots and becoming a more international organization. This week ICANN also announced it would establish an “engagement center” in Beijing to work with the Chinese government on issues like protecting URL trademarks.

“There has been a time when maybe the engagement between ICANN and China was tentative, but I think we’ve crossed that line,” said Mr. Chehadé. “What we haven’t done well, which we’ve changed, is to just get to people around the planet and show them what we’re doing.”

According to a list of applications on ICANN’s website, the Chinese characters for benevolence, cell phone and company are among those being applied for by companies. Organizations and companies pay $185,000 as part of an application fee for a chance to take control of the various new Internet suffixes.

Chinese Internet giant Tencent Holdings Ltd. and Sina Corp., which operate competing microblogging services known as weibo, have both applied for the extension .weibo in both its Roman and Chinese iterations. (ICANN encourages those vying for the same suffixes to negotiate to share them.)

Despite the variety of new Chinese top-level domains, China’s biggest tech companies have mostly bid on new English options. For example Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. bid on the romanizations of its various e-commerce products, like Taobao and Alipay, while anti-virus company Qihoo 360 Technology Co. bid on romanization of the Chinese words for cell phone, safety and cloud.

Though the Chinese domain names are likely to be popular for advertisers who will be able to post web addresses in characters more recognizable for many in China, the long-term use by Chinese schools of the pinyin romanization system means that many in China have little problem adapting to typing in English to look for websites, and over the past decade many have indeed gotten used to it.

Nonetheless, Mr. Chehadé said, the new non-Roman address endings will help promote the universality of the Internet: “As people who write in Latin characters we should not forget the incredible impact this will be having on people…When you see huge ad signs here in Beijing or in the Middle East and everything is written in Chinese and the website is in English, it continues to denote that this is not a universal system in a way.”

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